was curious if this implements a method to obtain plastic without fluids, which would help with megabasing efforts.

There are two recipes for plastic: one requiring steam, wood, and light oil; the other cellulose and petroleum.

Cellulose can be made directly: basically from woodpulp and sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid can be made from biomass, water, and cellulose.

Biomass production can be primed with water and fertilizer (for which you will need sulfur again). Once you have some biomass, you can switch to other recipes that run on biomass (feed back a small part of the product as ingredient), water, liquid air (one also takes ash).

Biomass can also be converted to different stuff. Put it into the bioreactor together with water, and there are recipes that output a) cellulose and light oil; b) petroleum gas; c) lubricant. Another recipe requires coal (which you can make via wood/woodpulp --> charcoal --> coal), steam, and biomass; this will get you water and crude oil.

In my own game, I haven't set up regular oil production yet. All the plastic I have is made the conventional way so far -- but with self-produced coal and self-made petroleum gas. The difficulty is to get petroleum to make sulfur to make fertilizer. To get the production of petroleum gas started, I use Wood gasifcation (which will make heavy/light oil, petroleum gas, and tar from wood). In the beginning, almost all of the produced wood will go back into the cycle to grow seeds (which will be grown into saplings from which you can make wood and lots of wood pulp in your biofarms), to make ash (for fertilizer), and for wood gasification. Once you've produced enough fertilizer to feed all biofarms (plus the bionurseries for seeds/saplings), more wood will be produced in less time, so you have enough wood left to get a steady supply of coal. Once you've upgraded to advanced fertilizer, the production is increased even more. I also convert all of the biofarms' woodpulp output into woodbricks, and these to solid fuel.

I don't have a megabase yet, but I've set richness, size, and frequency of coal patches to a minimum value and mined only the coal in the starting area. But 48 biofarms (I'll eventually go with 64 in my current BI area) running on advanced fertilizer produce enough fuel to keep my base going -- but it isn't running regularly yet because I wasted a lot time on playing with combinators and laying the ground for a smart railway system. I'm eager to see how far I'll get this way. Regular oil production (but using Cargo ships' off-shore oil instead of the oil-patches on land) will be added later because I really want to play with the ships. But BI also offers strong solar options (solar farms which compress 50 solar panels into one entity, solar boilers that can feed steam engines, and musk floor) so that I'm quite optimistic that it will be sufficient to feed even a big base. :-D

by fluidboxes i refer to the in-game prototype "Furnace" or "Assembly Machine" that has "fluidboxes", areas to take in or put out fluids.

the fluids are one of the worst performing aspects of the game, and if we need 10,000 entities of each for a plastic output, it'll be very expensive, CPU-wise.

unfortunately it sounds like every recipe tree you mentioned need some form of fluid at some step - water, steam, crude oil, light oil, or petroleum gas.

the physics calculations of these items flowing through pipes are substantial and I don't really see any additional "logistics challenges" in using pipes other than trying to use as few as possible to minimise their performance impact.

so that's why we want to make plastic without fluids. in Earth itself, we could even just grab floating plastic trash from the oceans, but of course if you used a special offshore pump that gives polluted water to filter, it would be another fluidbox.

so here is how plastics are made in real life:

The formation of the repeat units for thermoplastics usually begins with the formation of small carbon-based molecules that can be combined to form monomers. The monomers, in turn, are joined together by chemical polymerization mechanisms to form polymers. The raw material formation may begin by separating the hydrocarbon chemicals from natural gas, petroleum, or coal into pure streams of chemicals. Some are then processed in a “cracking process.” Here, in the presence of a catalyst, raw materials molecules are converted into monomers such as ethylene (ethene) C2H4, propylene (propene) C3H6, and butene C4H8 and others. All of these monomers contain double bonds between carbon atoms such that the carbon atoms can subsequently react to form polymers.

Other raw material chemicals are isolated from petroleum, such as benzene and xylenes. These chemicals are reacted with others to form the monomers for polystyrene, nylons, and polyesters. The raw materials have been changed into monomers and no longer contain the petroleum fractions. Still other raw materials can be obtained from renewable resources, such as cellulose from wood to make cellulose butyrate. For the polymerization step to work efficiently, the monomers must be very pure. All manufacturers purify raw materials and monomers, capturing unused raw materials for reuse and byproducts for proper disposition.

you can separate Coal into its monomers - and you can use solid items instead of fluids for this.

those chemical components can be recombined into plastic through polymerisation.

by fluidboxes i refer to the in-game prototype "Furnace" or "Assembly Machine" that has "fluidboxes", areas to take in or put out fluids.

Ooops, just got carried away a bit and ignored the "fluidboxes" part. :-)

the fluids are one of the worst performing aspects of the game, and if we need 10,000 entities of each for a plastic output, it'll be very expensive, CPU-wise.

unfortunately it sounds like every recipe tree you mentioned need some form of fluid at some step - water, steam, crude oil, light oil, or petroleum gas.

I believe it wouldn't be possible to remove need for fluidboxes completely. While generating plastic from solid material may be feasible, there still are the bio-nurseries and bio-farms that need lots of water for producing seeds, saplings, and wood in the amounts necessary to sustain a continuous plastic production.

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you can separate Coal into its monomers - and you can use solid items instead of fluids for this.

those chemical components can be recombined into plastic through polymerisation.

While this certainly sounds like an interesting idea (and yes, I definitely agree with you that taking load off the CPU by reducing the number of fuel boxes is good!), it is more than I can and want to do for the time being. I'm just collaborating here; I'm not particularly gifted in regard to graphics; I also have some other mods to look after; and there still are the demands of RL (work stuff: new project just started, and there may be another one, big one
coming up after that).

I'll put this on the TODO list for later.